Meeting Abstract
Visually striking animals are found across the Tree of Life, but we are still untangling the story behind bold color pattern displays. Color patterns can help animals achieve crypsis or communicate with conspecifics and other species. Bold patterns such as stripes (horizontal linear patterns), bars (vertical linear patterns) and contrasting spots can also help animals avoid recognition by visually disrupting a recognizable body outline. Further, some disruptive patterns are hypothesized to combine with movement to create erroneous speed and direction signals (motion dazzle), or redirect attacks towards the anterior (motion redirection). Such misleading signals are hypothesized to help thwart predation. While studies continue to resolve the proximate drivers of color pattern evolution, the influence that they have on broad taxonomic and time scales remain much less resolved. We employ phylogenetic comparative methods to explore the evolutionary history of color pattern traits across a diverse radiation of vertebrates: teleost fishes. Additionally, we assess the potential coevolutionary relationship between bar and stripe patterns and body streamlining in fishes. Consistent with early observational work on fish depth and stripe orientation on the body, our quantitative macroevolutionary analysis reveal that fishes with different orientations of linear patterning (i.e. barring, striping) possess differing body shapes. Fishes with bar patterns have less streamlined body shapes while striped fishes have more streamlined shapes. These results suggest that predation predation pressure may drive coevolutionary dynamics between color pattern traits and morphology over macroevolutionary scales.
